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Steven van Wel felt like he was always on the lookout for
wireless service. But the places he could stay connected weren’t
always the places where he wanted to work. Two years ago, he
launched Karma, a mobile
wireless service, to solve this common problem for himself and
other mobile workers. When you purchase Karma, you receive a
pay-as-you-go Internet hot spot and can share that wireless
signal with those around you.

One of the biggest challenges Karma faces is that its 15-person
team is spread out over 4 time zones with a 16-hour difference
between San Francisco and Seoul, Korea. To overcome these
obstacles, van Wel uses apps to keep everyone connected and on
the same page.

Here are three apps he can’t live without:

Sunrise.
Van Wel was unhappy with the basic Apple Calendar app he was
using because it was cumbersome to send out meeting invites and
he had to manually enter addresses into meeting invites. He
discovered Sunrise about six months ago after meeting one of
the company’s investors and was immediately impressed with
its simplicity for scheduling meetings. Van Wel likes that
Sunrise includes all the social media links for meeting
participants in meeting invites, inserts the address of the
location and automatically sets up a Google Hangout for the
meeting. “I have a meeting this afternoon with a potential
customer, and I can click on the social media links in the invite
right before the meeting so I can read his latest tweets and know
what is important to him at the moment,” van Wel says. “I used to
often be late for meetings because I spent valuable time walking
around asking strangers if they were the person I was meeting.
But today I will just look at Alex’s picture on my phone as I
walk through the café and get to my meeting on time.”

World Time
Buddy. Last year, Karma needed to
cancel an important conference call scheduled with people
scattered in four different time zones because a key player
didn’t show. That caller hadn’t known that Daylight Savings Times
started a week earlier in Amsterdam than the U.S. and hung up
before the call started. Since mistakes like this were common, an
employee told van Wel about this tool (and mobile app) which
automatically calculates the time zones, including daylight
savings times for all meeting participants. “The big difference
in this app and other time zone apps is that we can integrate the
app into our calendar program so we can see everyone’s schedule,”
van Wel says. “Since we have started using World Time Buddy, we
haven’t messed up on one meeting.”

iDoneThis.
At its launch, Karma employees held short staff meeting on Google
Hangouts at each day’s start. But this system soon become
unmanageable. “When it was 9 a.m. in New York, our employees in
San Francisco were still sleeping.” No one time was perfect for
every time zone and it was difficult to track what each team
member was working on. An iDoneThis investor clued van Wel into
iDoneThis and now instead of the daily meetings, each staff
member sends out a 140-character message to an internal
website. The app then sends team members a summary email of all
the statuses at a time of each person’s choosing. He
estimates that this app saves each of his employees at least 30
minutes of time each day because they no longer have to sit
through daily staff meetings. “The app has really helped our team
know exactly what each other is working on each day even though
we are working in several different continents.”